Can recent cross-national statistical studies on the causes of civil war be trusted? The most influential studies have been by Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler (C&H). This paper from the Crisis States Research Centre argues that their research is filled with empirical, methodological and theoretical problems that lead to unjustified conclusions. They seek to ascertain the causes of civil war and the motives of rebels without analysing civil wars and rebels.
C&H distinguish between political science, which relates rebellion to grievances, and economic theory, which sees rebellion as motivated by greed. Statistical analysis leads them to conclude that economic variables have more explanatory power than political and social variables. Their findings have been reported in the media and cited in governmental and international reports. But their unsubstantiated explanations of results, incomplete, inaccurate and statistically biased data and analytical flaws preclude an adequate understanding of the causes of civil war. The idea that dependence on natural resources heightens a country’s risk of war because it affords rebels opportunity for extortion is not based on evidence; it is an inference drawn from a correlation between the onset of civil war and the ratio of primary commodity exports to Gross Domestic Product.
C&H’s approach has numerous flaws:
- To conduct a statistical analysis of the causes of civil war, C&H must find numerical indicators for each of their variables. Many cannot be easily captured numerically, leading to the use of arbitrary proxies.
- In several cases, the proxies do not capture the relevant variable. Some measures intended to test for opportunity could just as well be indicators of grievance. Not one of C&H’s variables entails an observation of rebel behaviour.
- Correlation does not imply causality. Relationships cannot be explained without thorough investigation of context. The conclusions drawn by C&H from their statistical analysis are speculative and based on untested assumptions.
- Problems of geographical scale, statistical bias and inaccurate and missing data make C&H’s study vulnerable to serious measurement errors and artificial findings. As well as suspect interpretation, the correlations themselves may be misleadingly false.
This critique is relevant to future attempts to analyse the causes of civil war:
- Grievance and opportunity should not be seen as competing explanations for rebellion. Opportunity can be created, seized, spurned or ignored depending on motives and other causal factors.
- C&H’s quantitative method does not enable them to observe rebel behaviour directly. They disregard evidence on the sources and cost of weaponry, support from foreign governments, recruitment and financing of rebel soldiers and documented cases of rebel extortion.
- C&H’s information about the wars in their sample is similarly limited. They do not examine the intensity and scope of the war, the way it is fought, events leading up to it, rebel demands and popular support.
- Limited to numerical data at the structural level, C&H ignore politics, history, ideology, government decisions, regional contexts and repression. All are critical to the causes and incidence of civil war.
- In reality, civil wars have a range of different types of causes: structural conditions, dynamic causes, catalytic events, actors’ decisions and soldiers’ motives. This framework highlights how narrow C&H’s focus is.
